


I Like It When You Sleep

by grandtheftLove



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, F/M, girl liam, god so many drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-06-05
Packaged: 2018-04-03 01:20:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4081033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grandtheftLove/pseuds/grandtheftLove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Zayn sits cross legged on the sheets, staring at the embers burning at end of whatever the hell it is he’s smoking, the only light in the pitch black room. There are cigarette holes in the duvet. He doesn’t care what he smokes anymore. When he’s not high off the taste of Liam on his tongue, it’s got to be something else, anything else. He only smokes when she’s asleep, and he knows withdrawal from Liam would be harder than withdrawal from anything else he’s sucked into his lungs, but it’s so hard, he’s so fucked up."</p><p>Inspired by the poem "I Like It When You Sleep" By Matty Healy of the 1975, Insomniac Zayn struggles to protect the girl he is head over heels in love with from the drug addiction that consumes him. He's guilty for being who he is and he's guilty because Liam loves him, and Liam deserves so much more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Like It When You Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> Matty's poem here: https://twitter.com/truman_black/status/552808312115191808  
> This fic got angstier than I was expecting and druggier than I was expecting but I thought it came out pretty well and hopefully you all like it! All of the bolded text are lines from the poem, and any thing that seems weird or like a typo in those lines are purely his, because I copied those lines directly.  
> Follow me on tumblr @drakecareofyou

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful - yet so unaware of it.** _

Every night, Zayn looks down at Liam and cries. Liam sleeps like an angel; her eyelashes flutter on her pink cheeks and her lips part and she reaches out, searching for Zayn in the sheets, as Zayn leans away from the touch. Zayn feels like he doesn’t deserve it. All his sins and mistakes have rotted him from the inside, and he feels like he’s contagious. He can’t protect her from himself in the day, not when she's looking at him with her big brown eyes, falling over herself being ridiculously in love with Zayn. He can’t resist her, not when her arms are flung around him, pressing hot kisses to his neck. Some nights he touches her, when he feels like his chest will explode, but most nights he holds back.

Her fingers manage to stretch far enough to brush the bare skin of Zayn’s bare hip. He lets them linger for a moment, _craving_ her, _burning_ for her, before moving away again.  Liam finds solace curling around the duvet instead, humming in her sleep as her body settles into a new position.

He squeezes his eyes shut, and tears slip down his face. He doesn’t deserve her, not her presence, not her love. She’s a curtain made from silk, dancing in a summer breeze, and he’s fire waiting to set her aflame. He tells her she’s beautiful. She laughs and kisses his mouth, but Zayn knows she doesn’t understand just how breath-taking she is. She doesn’t know.

When Liam sleeps, Zayn tells her everything. Everything he’s done wrong in the world, all the blood on his hands, only Liam’s serene sleeping form knows the truth about Zayn. Liam doesn’t know anything Zayn says. Liam doesn’t know how beautiful she is.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for I can go outside amongst the due and feel at last and one with you.** _

 

Zayn’s so numb. Zayn can’t feel a single fucking thing. It’s the drugs obviously. Liam was mad. She tells him stop fucking with it, he can’t see what it’s doing to her, apparently. Of course he can’t, he can’t see fucking anything. His vision’s gone white. Liam was mad, and then she wasn’t, and then they fucked.

“Slow,” Liam says, so they fuck slow. He can’t feel anything but her soft thighs tightening on his hips and her wet little pussy rippling around his cock as she comes. Liam lays on top of him when they’re done, with her legs entangled in Zayn’s, burying her head in his shoulder, breathing in the smell of his skin, tracing the lines of his tattoos with her tongue.

“I love you Li,” Zayn says into her neck, fingers sliding down the curve of her back.

“Don’t leave me, please,” she says. Zayn doesn’t know if she means tonight or in general. It doesn’t matter.

When she falls asleep, he slips out of the bed and steps out onto her balcony. It’s snowing, and the flakes melt on his bare ass. He leans on the frozen railing and takes a deep breath. His high is winding down, but for once he doesn’t feel drained and empty. He feels whole. Liam can do that to him. Liam fills him up when she bubbles over, and plugs his holes with her touch. Zayn’s never been in love before, and he doesn’t know if it’s supposed to feel this way, like he’s a filthy little leech, attached to her just to survive, taking the life from her, dragging her down. He knows when he’s with her, something clicks, he knows exactly where he’s going just like everyone else. Liam’s a fucking drug, and Zayn’s addicted. She’s rare and expensive, and he’s scared he’s going to use her up too fast, and he can’t buy more when she’s gone.

“Zayn, what’re you doing? You’ll catch a cold,” Liam says, sitting up, bleary eyed.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for it is where the worries meet with all desires complex and small that materialise upon your wall.** _

__

The first time Zayn saw Liam, he was spray painting the side of a bridge. Liam was wearing a blue peacoat and leggings, and almost suffocating in the infinite amount of scarves wrapped snugly around her neck. It was fall, a bit nippy, but there was no need to bundle up like she did. She stopped behind him and rocked back on her heels, tilting her head back out of her scarf nest to look at his work.

“Well,” she said, her breath just barely visible in the air, “that’s a bit different.”

Zayn twisted around, shaking a fresh can in his hand. He had been painting a cityscape, glowing with lights, over all the sloppy graffiti covering the ugly cement wall. He thought it was coming together to be something remarkable, but it was nothing compared to the girl in front of him.

“What’s your name then, love?”

 

The first time they slept in the same bed, before Zayn knew better, she was wearing one of his old t shirts, and he reached around and slipped one hand underneath and one hand into her panties, and fell asleep breathing in her hair.

 

Liam talks in her sleep, and Zayn listens. It’s polite. It’s gibbership mostly, bits and pieces about peanut butter and jelly and her childhood teddy bear named George, but every now and then Zayn catches his name, or ILoveYouIWantYouIMissYou… Zayn.

Sometimes she has nightmares, and rolls about and moans in her sleeps and doesn’t wake up, and it’s almost worse than when she’s awake. He knows he’s bad for her, he knows he’s depleting her, tainting her, but she cries out, clutches at the sheet, makes like she needs him, and he can’t just leave her like that. He pulls her up to his chest and holds her there until she stops shaking.

He worries about her, worries that she trusts him too much, but Liam worries more. She worries that he drinks too much, smokes too much, doesn’t eat enough, doesn’t care enough.

 

The first time they fucked, Liam rode him wearing one of his old t shirts with her panties pushed to the side, and put her fingers on his lips for him to taste and he came inside of her.

 

Zayn finds it spectacular, because he and Liam are just the same as the city scape he painted that first day. She’s always lit up and beautiful, inviting and asking to be explored, and her head is so very busy. Zayn’s the graffiti underneath, covered up by something beautiful, but the dirt and grime is still there. Just because the cityscape is there now, masking the old history, a fresh start, it doesn’t mean people aren’t still graffiting on top. Soon Zayn’s little work of art will be lost in it, like it was never even there, and it’ll be Zayn’s fault for not stopping it.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for smoking is great and I do alot more without you awake.** _

 

Zayn sits cross legged on the sheets, staring at the embers burning at end of whatever the hell it is he’s smoking, the only light in the pitch black room. There are cigarette holes in the duvet. He doesn’t care what he smokes anymore. When he’s not high off the taste of Liam on his tongue, it’s got to be something else, anything else.

When Liam’s awake, she snatches the cigarettes out of his hand mechanically. It’s turned into a reflex. Zayn scowls and says he’s going for walk, and Liam knows full well that he’s going out to buy more drugs, since she hid everything he’s got.

Do you see what you’re doing to me?! She’s crying.

Zayn stomps around the house and yells and says things he doesn’t mean and tries to kiss her and calls her a bitch when she pushes him away.

I swear to god, I fucking swear, Zayn, if you walk out that door you’ll never see me again. Fucking JESUS, Zayn.

Zayn wishes she hated him as much as she acted like she did. Zayn does see what he’s doing to her, but he can’t fucking stop himself. And he’d be even more fucked up if she left. Liam knows that. Liam wants to fix him.

He walks out that day, and takes something he’s never seen before, and somehow manages to get back home, but he’s so fucked up, and it feels like Liam’s been gone for weeks and he throws up 7 times before she comes back again.

Now he only smokes when she’s asleep, and there are cigarette holes in the duvet, and he knows withdrawal from Liam would be harder than withdrawal from anything else he’s sucked into his lungs, but it’s so hard, he’s so fucked up.

He takes a drag and looks down at Liam’s sleeping form. Her lips are so full, and skin so soft, so smooth. She’s more beautiful than the day he met her. Zayn thinks it’s impossible to dirty an angel’s wings. Tonight he indulges.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for the things missed too and to know I’m alive longer than you.** _

__

Zayn likes watching Liam sleep because he learns her little quirks. He thinks he must know her better than she knows him. Most people spend a third of their lives asleep, and Zayn’s life must be much fuller than anyones else because he’s spent almost a third of the last two years learning, loving, watching her. He leans down and whispers a secret to sleeping Liam.

There was a day when Zayn was riding on a cloud made of Liam’s sweater, and she fell backwards into Zayn’s lap and said, “Tell me a story.”

Zayn’s already told Liam all his stories. She just wasn’t listening.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for the infinite sadness of London and loss and the fold out mattress.** _

Zayn hates London. It looks so cold when he stares out at it at night, through his window he’s sure hasn’t been cleaned in years. All he sees is a mass of gray blocks, pin pricked with tiny orange lights. He remembers home, which was always so green and grassy, and never lonely. He leans on the window sill and pushes at the latch. Its painted shut, Zayn knows that, but every night he tries it anyway, hoping one day the paint will magically crack and the window will swing open, and he can finally breathe.

His window is the opening to the soul of every person in the city. Theres only so much he can see out of it, half of the view is the graffitied building next door, but over the top of that he can see where the sky meets the buildings kilometers away. He imagines that every light is someone’s heart, beating fast, beating slow, beating for the last time. Blinking lights; beating hearts. Sometimes he sees a prostitute, shivering in the rags of an old party dress. Her heart’s bleeding and she’s fucking some bloke twice her age to feed her siblings. The man straightening his tie 20 kilometers away, he’s yearning for the girl he think he’s in love with, and she’s using him to get her kicks.

Everyone’s lonely in the city. Everyone’s so lost. Zayn included. But he’s looking out the window, wishing he could help them all, and pushing away all the people who want to help him.

 

Zayn goes with Liam the first time she gets a tattoo. She cries, and chokes through the tears and gritted teeth that “it doesn’t hurt at all.” Liam’s so strong, synonym for stubborn. Zayn tilts his head back and laughs at her. Her eyes do their signature crinkle, though her mouth stays a hard set line. Zayn holds her hand.

 

Back when Liam lived in the dorms, she used to sneak him in, and they’d try to have sex on her twin bed and be quiet about it but it was all giggling and limbs flung off the side and falling off all together sometimes. Zayn had to kneel between her legs with one arm reaching all the way up her body to cover her mouth and the next morning her roommate glared at them.

 

He hates it when she’s at his flat. All he has are dented pans and an old couch with a fold out mattress that he found on the street. It creaks rhythmically when Liam rides him. Zayn’s mattress is thin and he can feel the springs when he lays down and it leaves her skin with bruises, but she insists that if he can’t come to her, she’ll come to him. He wishes she wouldn’t. He can’t shake her. Not from his brain, not from his muscles, not from his life.

Zayn can’t stay in bed with her tonight. He’d wake her with his shakes. His mattress takes every movement and multiplies it by 10. He’s shaking for cocaine.  His skull knocks against the window when he leans on it. Tonight’s secret is that he’s going clean.

 

_**I like it when you sleep,  for the reasons I can’t so I jealously squirm and count moles on your arms.** _

 

Liam’s good in every way Zayn’s bad. Their relationship is a juxtaposition no one could’ve predicted. Zayn’s so jealous of her entire being, her existence in a realm of perfection. He can never be her, but it’s enough to have her. He seeks to consume her, to drown himself in her essence. He wants his to blood to flow with her, his heart to beat in time with her thoughts. Every breath he takes in her presence makes him wonder how he could be so lucky to have her smile at him like that.

They say opposites attract.

At the beginning, Zayn wondered if she was bettering him, or if he was worsening her, or both. Would they become an average of the two? Zayn doesn’t want that to happen to Liam, she deserves better than that. But Zayn’s so selfish, how could he find it in him to save her from himself?

 

Zayn’s an insomniac. He doesn’t know if he’s always been like this or if he fucked his brain up with the drugs. He can’t remember. That’s from the drugs for sure. The first time he and Liam slept in the same bed, he found himself kissing all the freckles on her arms and tracing the outline of the birthmark on her neck with his eyes. Some nights he tries to count every mark on her body, tries to remember every spot and mole between her legs from memory, and manages to lull himself into something like sleep.

Liam sleeps deeply, even sleeps through it when his tears turn into sobs trying to hold back the pain. Something in her subconscious must be in tune with Zayn though, because she reaches out father, holds him tighter when it happens.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, forgive me my dear for all the cocaine has imprisoned me here.** _

 

There’s a day when Zayn’s on edge, and does a line too many. He falls into bed, strokes his hand through sleeping Liam’s hair. He doesn’t fall asleep but he doesn’t move. When Liam wakes up, she rolls over to peck Zayn on the cheek, lays her hand on his chest and curls her leg around his. Zayn’s eyes are open but he doesn’t move. Liam whispers something in his ear but he doesn’t move.

Liam sits up. She smacks him on the chest. She shakes him. She screams, she cries, she tries to drag him off the bed.

“Stop it Li,” Zayn tries to say, but he can’t. He can’t move. Liam’s cheeks have gone past pink into red, and she looks hysterical. She pulls out her phone and calls someone, one hand gripped tightly in her hair as tears stream down her face. He can’t hear who she’s talking too, she sounds like she’s light years away.

She throws herself on him, wrapping her arms around him tightly, fingernails digging in deep enough to draw blood. He can’t feel it. His legs are lead bearing down on the mattress, trying to break through the frame, and his chest is caving in on his heart.

After that, Liam hides his drugs. After that, they fight. Zayn walks out.

 

The first time Zayn knew he was poison to her was 6 months after they met. Liam licks the taste of tar out of Zayn’s mouth. Zayn licks the taste of her from between her legs. They ebb and flow and soar, high off of drugs they take off of eachother.

Zayn comes in late one night, 4:30 in the morning kind of late. Liam’s mad, I couldn’t sleep without you wherewereyou I waited for you were you fuckingsomeslut kind of mad. She slaps him and then climbs into his lap and cries.

Zayn’s so fucked up, but what’s new.

That afternoon Zayn finds bruises that match his fingertips on her arms

That night is the first night Zayn cries and evades her touch. He’s disgusted with himself. If Liam notices she doesn’t say anything.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for I’m guilty of work and match of the day and the girls that twerk.** _

 

Zayn’s war with himself is a little more peaceful when Liam asleep, because she can’t look at him like he’s a saint, when she knows (she _must_ know, how could she not) he’s far from it. It makes Zayn feel even worse, because he doesn’t treat her well enough. Even regardless of him being who he is, it’s well in his capacity to be better to her. He doesn’t pay enough attention to her, watching football when she’s telling a story, staring at his nails when she’s talking. The guilt of his life and his habits all builds up and multiplies upon itself, he’s guilty for being guilty for godsakes, until he can’t look her in the eyes.

Until she’s got him fuck stupid, kneeling between his legs, and looking up at him so _eagerly_.  

Zayn’s friends took him to a strip club once, and a girl named Candy rubbed herself all over him and he felt sick. He went home, sure that Liam would smell her all over him, and when she touched him he felt sicker. So he told Liam all about Candy and when he was done she laughed and kissed his neck and Zayn thought _how?_ And then Zayn thought a little more and thought _oh, it’s because she trusts me_. He wished she didn’t.

 

The first day Zayn and Liam met there was hi and hello and what’s your name then love, and somehow they ended up sitting underneath the bridge all day just talking. Zayn decided his art could wait till another day. Liam was 19, and her hair was shorter then. That day, Zayn fell in love with her eyes. Her eager eyes the color of sticky maple syrup, and Zayn was stuck on her.

The first time he heard Liam sing was the first time he told her he loved her. She was in the shower and Zayn slipped in behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist and whispered it in her ear. She turned around and flung her arms around his neck and her eyes crinkled, but she didn’t say it back. Zayn was okay with that. They stood in the shower wrapped up in each other like that for ten minutes while Zayn kissed every inch of skin on her face and Liam sang a bit more when her lips weren’t occupied.

They talk about everything. Comic books and good TV shows and bad TV shows and politics and the universe. Two years of this and Liam still doesn’t know what Zayn does for a living. She asked once, and Zayn gave a noncommittal “it’s complicated” and she never asked again. It’s better this way, or worse, it lets Liam trust him much more than she should.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for my return after weeks is an incomplete feeling when you are not dreaming.** _

 

The thing about Liam is she’s a good girl. Was. Is. She was 19 when they met and she went to Uni and didn’t drink because she couldn’t and didn’t drink because she didn’t want to. She studied music. When she sleeps she gets a little worry line between her eyebrows. Liam likes to fix things. She fixed the telly and the wobbly leg on the bed and the way the faucet spluttered when the knobs for hot water and cold water were on at the same time. She tried to fix Zayn and she broke herself.

Zayn took LSD to feel free but Liam was already free so she took it for fun. Everything was for fun with her, she didn’t need anything. There was the time Zayn’s guilt overrode his selfishness, and he told her he was leaving for good.

“You’re running away, Zayn,” She cried at him. “That’s what you do.”

He tried to explain why. He was sober. It made everything feel worse.

“Stop it, Zayn. I don’t need your goddamn excuses. You smoke your goddamn weed to run away from your life and you do fucking coke to run away from your mistakes and pop fucking vicodin to run away from your friends and drink codeine and hope that you might get lucky and die. Fucking Zayn.”

She kept saying his name. Every time is a blow to his heart. He looked at his feet. She pushed him.

“Go ahead and leave Zayn, just you fucking do it. You’ll just keep running your entire life, away from the people who want to help you and soon you’ll find yourself in the middle of nowhere with no one. Like fucking Forrest Gump without the happy ending”

Zayn wanted to laugh, but it hurt his chest. Only you could make a Forrest Gump reference at a time like this he said. The tears are making her makeup smear.

“Shut the fuck up Zayn.” Fuck you Zayn. “I tried to help you, it was finally working and you can’t stand change and now you’re running.”

I’m keeping you safe Liam.

She looked at him, right in the eyes, disgusted. Like she should. “I can take care of myself Zayn. I’m not a child. You don’t have to watch out for me, I make my own decisions, I picked you on my own, and you have no fucking right to take that away and claim you’re doing it for me.”

Liam was 21. Barely out of the nest. He wished she could see just how young he was.

When they meet, she was 19 and he was 24. He thought he was too old. She rode him in his old t shirt with her panties pushed to the side and made him forget. Now she’s 21 and he’s 26 and she doesn’t know a goddamn thing about the world. He tells her that. She shouldn’t have to learn it from his fucked up point of view.

She screamed and slapped him. She tried to kiss him. Zayn let her. It’s slow and she tastes like tears.

When the door closed behind him it felt final.

 

The first time Zayn kisses Liam is the third time he sees her. Autumn turns into winter quickly and there are snowflakes melting at the ends of her curls and eyelashes. She tilts her head back to taste the snow on her tongue and Zayn wants to taste the snow on her tongue too. They walk along the road with one hand each in Zayn’s right pocket until a car comes down the road too quick and showers Liam in slush from the gutter. They go back to Zayn’s and he unwinds her scarves one by one and gives her an old t shirt to wear that she never gives back. He smokes a cigarette and then she lets him touch her skin under his shirt and slip his fingers between her thighs.

 

It’s three weeks after he leaves before anyone says anything to him about Liam. She’s so fucked up. That’s new. She’s not going to class and she won’t leave her bed and there are cigarette holes in her duvet.

Zayn throws up. How can he love someone so much and wish he never met her at the same time? His last attempt at saving her and he ruined her. He doesn’t go back, not right away. He hopes maybe she’ll get through it and over him and everything will be back to the way it should’ve been all along. Three weeks later someone tells him her flat smells like smoke because it reminds her of Zayn and she went to sleep and didn’t wake up for four days.

He goes to the bridge where they meet and leans over the edge and contemplates what would happen if he falls. He tries to step over but his feet take him to Liam’s flat instead. He’s scared to knock. He’s scared he won’t compare to her drug induced dreams of him and he’s fucked her up for good now.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for during the day your breath lac ks character.** _

 

The first time Zayn watched Liam sleep, really studied her, he was enamored with the way she breathed. It slow and smooth and every time she exhaled she pushed the evil out and every time she inhaled she took holiness in. When her sleep talk was too quiet to be coherent, her breath comes out in little patches, whispering to ghosts. When it’s five in the morning and her eyes are fuzzy and half asleep she spreads her legs for Zayn and her breath comes out in soft puffs against his ear.

When what she’s done puts her to sleep, she breaths like there’s not enough air to go around. Big deep breaths that make her chest double in size and sink deep when she blows it out. She said the air felt clean.

When she’s awake, her breath is the same, always the same, mostly. Lovely still, but everything about her is so beautiful when she’s so unaware.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for I swear I’ll protect her from the wheedling, redolent, saccharine nectar.** _

__

When Zayn comes back, Liam’s cheeks aren’t quite as full, and when he uses his spare key to let himself in, she lifts her head from the mattress and asks if he’s real. Zayn lies down carefully beside her and presses his forehead to hers, combs his hands through the knots in her hair. Her eyes don’t seem to focus on anything. She leans forward and kisses him but he knows she’s lost in a dream. Her lips taste of sickly sweet fake sugar.

“Fuck,” Zayn says into her mouth. Her breath is thick with the smell of cough syrup. She’s gone and gotten hooked on codeine. He cries into her neck and she’s too dizzy to know what’s going on. He did coke before he came over and he hopes one of them doesn’t die tonight. He searches around the bed until he finds the bottle and pours the sticky bright red liquid down the sink.

The next day she wakes up and knows it’s not a dream. She wants to keep her hands tangled in his shirt, never wants to stop touching him, never wants to let him go again, but she can’t stop scratching at her neck. He asks her why she did it.

I Couldn’t Breath Without You.

She said the air felt clean.

Her eyes don’t stop watering.

Liam’s so fucked up she thinks the cough syrup’s gone because she drank it all. She cries when he won’t let her go out and buy more. He tells her its the chemicals, its the fragrance, its the way it tastes of guile. He protects her. He holds her when she shakes, when she coughs, when she throws up over the side of the bed. He thinks maybe he’s repaying his debt, until he remembers its his fault she’s like this in the first place.

Neither of them can sleep. They twist their legs into a knot and whisper in the night. She whispers that he broke her heart. Her skin burns against his. It’s weeks before she’s better. She misses finals at Uni. She has to take them later. Zayn helps her study.

 

_**I like it when you sleep, for there are cracks in my ceiling that I know like the back of my heart- and to learn your body in half that manner was something desired from the start.** _

__

Liam’s slim. She moves like a bull in a China shop but when she tumbles into Zayn’s arms she fits like a missing puzzle piece and they move perfectly in sync, slip and slide through each other like koi fish through reeds. Zayn memorized the curve of her lips and her hips and made a map of her body and her nerves and wrote the sheet music of her voice in his head.

His fingers know just how to curve into her to make her bite her lip and his tongue learned how to flick so she’d bite his. The first time he and Liam slept in the same bed, he found solace kissing all the freckles on her arms.

When she’s not there he stares at the ceiling and counts the cracks in the drywall and pretends they’re the veins in Liam’s wrists. He _knows_ Liam, better than he knows himself. He makes her cum faster than he can get himself off. He knows her conscious, he knows her unconscious. God help him, he knows her.

He knows the way she thinks. He predicts her unpredictable. He knows what to say when she’s mad or sad, but he doesn’t always want to say it. She knows that. He knows Liam tried to fix him with her mouth, in more ways than one, and that she wants to be a famous singer, and doesn’t believe that she can. He knows sometimes she cries during her morning run.

The first time he saw her, truly saw her in all her glory, was 25 days after he met her. They were at her flat, and Zayn watched the television while Liam took a shower. She laid flat on the bed and used the sheets instead of a towel. Zayn made his way up her body with his eyes and then with his hands. Her soft brown curls tickled him when he spread her legs with his thigh.

When she fell asleep, he promised her he’d learn her, top to bottom.

 

**_I like it when you sleep, forbidden I sit in my chair for a bit._ **

 

Going clean is his secret for the night, because he’s scared it might turn into a lie. It doesn’t. He sits and listens to the rain fall on the window and watches lightening color the clouds from deep within. Liam’s hair is fanned out on the pillow.

Zayn sighs and feels at peace. His secret won’t stay a secret for long, not when his fingers can’t hold a cup of water without spilling it, not when he finds himself on the floor, trying to hold screams back through gritted teeth.

Liam stirs when thunder shakes the house. She can’t sleep soundly anymore anyways.

“You never touch me,” she says. “Why don’t you touch me anymore.”

Liam’s a fucking drug and Zayn won’t touch her until he knows how to control himself.

 

**_I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful - yet so unaware of it._ **

 

The first time Zayn says he’s sorry is two years and 7 months after they meet. They’re sitting under the bridge and Zayn’s art is still there and no one has touched it. It’s clean. Zayn says I’m sorry and Liam says for what and Zayn says for ruining you. Liam shakes her head and rubs his ankle. She doesn’t say anything else, but he knows what she wants to say. He didn’t ruin her. She’s wrong.

She’s so young and naive and never believes anything Zayn says. She’s sitting between his legs and it’s summer so Zayn leans forward and kisses her head. The afternoon sun lulls her to sleep and Zayn lets her twist a hand in his shirt even though it stretches it out. Her hair is long. She talks in her sleep. ILoveYou. The first time she told Zayn she loved him was when she was asleep and the second time was into his mouth the next morning when he was pulling on his jacket to leave. After that he let his jacket slide off his shoulders and decided not to go.

Zayn tore her apart and then put her back piece by piece. He’s sure there are some missing, but Liam doesn’t know that and Liam thinks she’s okay. She’s still got cracks and he’s afraid if he makes the wrong move she’ll shatter again. Liam says Zayn’s the glue keeping her together. She looks into his eyes and says it so sincerely, for a moment he thinks it may be true. He can see the veins in her eyelids when she sleeps and the way her mouth is pink and plump and slack and the worry line between her eyebrows. She’s an angel and she’s cleaned out the darkest parts of Zayn and she is so beautiful. Zayn’s addicted.


End file.
